Turkey's new Kurdish mayors denounce greed of predecessors
As Turkey's newly elected mayors take office, imagery of the outgoing administrations' waste and opulence is fueling an uproar about the ruling party's excesses.
Gilded doors, crystal chandeliers, marble bathrooms — a sea of luxury greeted Adnan Selcuk Mizrakli when he entered Diyarbakir’s city hall as the mainly Kurdish provincial capital’s new mayor. “Behold, behold,” Mizrakli told a group of journalists filming the event. “They built themselves palaces with the people’s money.”
The former doctor who was elected on the left-leaning pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) ticket with 63% of the vote was referring to the profligacy of his predecessor. Cumali Atilla, a bureaucrat from Ankara, had run the place since November 2016 under orders from the central government.
